


Memento Mori

by ABeckoningCat



Category: Alien: Isolation (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 05:36:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3278717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ABeckoningCat/pseuds/ABeckoningCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A small follow-up to "Noble  Heart".</p>
<p>Expecting that Samuels will eventually vanish from her life, as everyone else has, Ripley is surprised to receive an invitation to visit him for a few days on Earth.   She just doesn't understand why, and he isn't immediately forthcoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

> Like "Noble Heart", this fic makes certain non-canon assumptions about events running in tandem with, and following, the end of Alien: Isolation:
> 
> After Samuels's apparent death, his body is recovered and reactivated by two other survivors. Taking advantage of the escape paths created by Ripley's continuing movement throughout the station - and with Samuels's somewhat handicapped assistance - the survivors are able to escape Savastopol before its orbit deteriorates into the gas giant. Ripley, along with several other survivors fleeing the station, are picked up by various salvage vessels that came running to the distress beacon, eager to clean up whatever was left. Samuels has suffered extensive damage, but the two are reunited aboard one of the salvage ships headed back to Earth, the Noble Heart, and begin the long journey back to Earth.
> 
> This takes place several weeks to several months after Samuels has returned to Earth, and Ripley to the remains of her old life.

There weren’t many sacred places left in the world.  Not this world.

It turned out the universe was too vast to care about things like natural resources.  When it became clear that Earth was not unique, that the endlessness of space was practically lousy with liveable rock, it was suddenly impossible to make the argument for preservation.

Animals could be grown in labs, so what was the point of conserving their existence in the spaces better dedicated to concrete and steel, commerce and industry.  Forests dwindled, preserves became scarce, green became a color festooning highrise rooftops, not littering the places people actually needed to walk.

Imagine Ripley’s surprise when Samuels led her to one of the last natural holdouts near San Francisco.

“It used to be called San Bruno Mountain State Park,” he explained, standing behind her to block the press of bodies trying to crush them against the monorail doors.  Sometimes there were advantages to being tall.

“Used to be?” she looked back at him.  Back and up.

“Well.  That was before the Silicon Spread, as they called it.  They cut it down from about twenty-two hundred acres to just three hundred.”

The monorail coasted to a frictionless stop at the platform, and Samuels put a hand to her shoulder to prepare her for the push.  The moment the doors opened they were urged forward under a tidal rush of humanity, the android doing his best to buffer Ripley from the worst of it.  They stood aside to let the crowd disperse, then descended the stairs to the open-air station below.

Rocks and scrub brush, a few small evergreens planted alongside a carved-rock sign that said San Bruno Park Station.  Ripley fell in step beside her companion, wondering how often he came out here that he seemed so confident where to go.

“What did they replace the rest of the park with?”

“Industrial plants,” he said.  “High-end corporate sprawl.  Weyland-Yutani even has a headquarters here, nearer to the base of the mountain.  Research and Development, I believe.  It’s quite picturesque.”

“Is that how you know your way around?”

He looked surprised that she’d noticed.

“No, I… well, it’s easier if I just show you, I suppose.”

Anyone else would have fallen under severe scrutiny after such a remark, but Samuels had already earned himself a lifetime of special exemption from her suspicion.  It didn’t make this visit any weirder, to be sure; she’d accepted the invitation despite only vague allusions as to intent, and still didn’t understand why he’d asked her out here.  Why he’d arranged transport.  Why and how he’d managed to schedule her paid days off with her normally unyielding douchebag of a superintendent.

It was good suddenly having a friend in a high place, she supposed.  Just bewildering.

Most of all, although she hadn’t yet let the realization make it as far as her lips, she was glad to see him again.  Even after all they’d been through, up to and including the tortuous journey back on the _Noble Heart_ , she’d had every expectation that the name Christopher Samuels would become a less and less frequent appearance in her life.  She might see it again on paperwork, the odd quarterly report, but his ageless face would probably become a thing she was forced to forget, glimpsed only in the background of the odd Company holovid.  It was the story of her life, after all.

So far, the visit had been only superficially professional.  He promised her passingly interesting information on the _Nostromo_ that he wanted to share, but mostly he wanted her to “enjoy herself”.

She’d had to ask him to repeat that twice.

If she hadn’t already signed away every legal right imaginable to Weyland-Yutani, she’d assume he was trying to butter her for a waiver of liability.  But he wasn’t out to talk business.  He was out to take her to the aeronautical museum, and the zoo, and the children’s park up in Alameda.  Places she sensed he had only ever visited on his own, and enjoyed the opportunity to share with someone.

Amanda counted among her hobbies things like soldering and creative profanity, but admitted a newfound appreciation for some of these more mundane pursuits.  Watching Samuels feed the free-range peafowl.  Listening to him talk with legitimate enthusiasm about how cybernetic songbirds were helping to encourage biodiversity among the area’s depleted wildlife.  Seeing him try cotton candy for the first time, and completely losing her shit at his horrified, fish-mouthed dismay at the texture.

There had to be a catch in all this, but she couldn’t figure out what.

“You’re smiling,” he observed as they walked.  He sounded pleased.

“Am I?”  She cleared her throat, trying to recompose the set of her lips.  “You’d better play the lottery.”

Although there were undoubtedly areas of the park still naturally preserved, the inexorable creep of development was everywhere.  The wilderness was kept well at bay behind split-rail fencing, and the sidewalks only reluctantly evolved into paved walking paths at designated, stroller-friendly trailheads.  Neat signs even indicated where people could catch lunch at boutique commissaries, or how they might find their way back to this tech company, or that staffing firm, in case they’d lost their way.

Samuels led her neither up one of the hiking trails nor down to the office-park sprawl, guiding her instead towards a low stucco building set well apart from either.  It was well-maintained, hedged and fountained, but with strangely few windows or pedestrians nearby.

The lack of exits gave her immediate pause.  Without drawing attention to it Samuels slowed as well, gauging her readiness to proceed.

“What is it?” she said, tilting her head to the building.  “This place.”

“A memorial garden, of sorts.”  His hands clasped before him, head turning as he tried to see past the building’s wide profile.  “Although I’m not sure if the actual garden is in season.”

She winced.  “Like a cemetery?”

“Not… precisely,” he admitted.  “Traditional burials haven’t been permitted in the state since 2102.  Which is to say, there aren’t any corpses interred here, merely… memorials.”

Her suspicion returned like a low pilot light.

“Memorials for _whom_?”

His voice softened with entreaty.  “Amanda.  I wish… you’d just let me show you.”

Ripley faced down the long concrete walk to the building’s glass vestibule, each section patterned with impressions of Japanese maple leaves and small brass placards of the dead.  After a day of space ships, petting zoos and apparently horrible cotton candy, she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to conclude their afternoon here.

“Way to end things on a high note, Samuels.”

But she went with him, paying what felt like proper respect to the names beneath her feet, those engraved on the glass panels of the vestibule, chiseled into the marble of the entrance hall.  San Francisco may have drawn the shutters on burials only a few decades earlier, but it was far from the first place to reserve its land exclusively for the living.

“Have you ever been to a memorial garden before?” he asked, measuring his longer strides to match her own.  They walked at the speed of a bridal processional, heads turning as they scanned up the white granite walls, voices echoing like susurrations in a cathedral.  Samuels’s voice had a deep, velour softness here, even more gentle than usual.

“Twice,” she said, slowing as they drifted into another wing, one degree nicer than the one they’d left.  Here the dead weren’t just names on stone but represented by small, embedded glass compartments, each one containing a loving diorama of their most precious possessions.  A cameo, a photo in a brass frame, a lock of hair, a child’s toy.  “One for a little girl I knew that died in foster care.  The last one was almost ten years ago.”

He blinked, subtle evidence of some mental process or calculation.

“Your father?”

“Yeah.”  It should have bothered her that he knew about that, but realistically he probably knew far more about her than she could ever volunteer.  As they paused to admire some of the small tableaus, she decided it was actually a relief to have so little explaining to do.

“I was… fifteen or sixteen, I don’t even remember.  I’d been in the foster system for awhile by then, and he’d long since given up the illusion of wanting to be a part of my life.  Five bucks in a birthday card, usually a few months late, that was about the extent of the communication I had with him before he just dropped off the map altogether.”

She rose to the balls of her feet, straining to see a small pink and white rattle, a bonnet growing yellow despite the preservative lighting and humidity control.  Someone’s dreams, someone’s pain, carefully curated for all time.  

“Anyway.”  She lowered back to the soles of her feet, and they turned in slow sympathy, moving toward a small, sun-bright atrium junction.  “I figured he was gone for good, and then one day a Company rep shows up at the home saying he didn’t make it out of cryo on his last haul.  Trouble with his bed, something like that.”  She breathed in deeply and let it out again, but there was no sense of strain or loss to the sound.  “The Company paid to fly me out to the memorial service, and put what was left of his last estate into trust for me.  I actually used it to get my first job off-world.  Helped pay for my education, tools, and everything.”

“Do you feel he redeemed himself a little in the end, then?” Samuels asked.

“Not particularly.  Technically it was The Company that made sure I got paid.  If it were up to him, he probably would have kept going indefinitely, drinking or gambling away whatever he made.”

They fell quiet as an older woman passed them from one of the other wings, expression strained, her eyes still red from weeping.  Ripley took another breath and let it out.

“Please stop me if I start to curse out loud in here, okay?”

His mouth twitched.  “I’m only one man, Amanda.  But I’ll try.”

They stopped at the junction, faces turning upward as a shower of rainbow light poured down on them from above.  The atrium’s overhead oculi was arranged in a multi-colored starburst of stained glass, the afternoon clouds making way for the waning sun to paint them in soft, watercolor hues.  Samuels smiled faintly as he studied it, and Ripley watched him in the patchwork light.

“What about you?”

He blinked, unaccustomed to having questions turned on him.

“Me?”

“Have you ever been to a memorial?”  A pause as she blinked once, twice, three times, one each for the surrounding doorways.  “Before here, I mean.”

“Ah. No, I… well, I _wanted_ to…”

“You _wanted_ to?”

“It was… unpleasant business, sad to say.”  His head inclined toward the most dimly-lit of the wings, and side-by-side they turned in that direction.  “One of the inspectors with whom I’d worked fairly closely was killed when a synthetic he was working on suffered a meltdown.  A power cell containment breach.  I wanted to attend the services, of course, I thought it only right, but given the circumstances of his death, his family… well, a representative came to my office, and indicated that his wife would prefer I not attend.”

“They told you _not to come_?”

“He intimated that the family wasn’t quite ready to have a synthetic in attendance.”

“What a bunch of assho--”

“--Amanda.”

She sighed.  “Right.  Sorry.”

“Beyond that,”  he continued.  “No.  I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that -- until very recently -- I haven’t had many occasions to attend them at all.  Even Taylor’s family declined all but a private service overseas.”

“What about synthetic funerals?  What are those like?”

Ripley regretted the question as soon as she’d asked.  While cybernetics hadn’t been at the backbone of her education or work history, she knew enough about it to realize -- only a moment too late -- that Samuels and his kind were still treated much like defunct washing machines once they finally wore down.  Knowing it, however, and associating it with the man striding so naturally beside her, were completely different things.

Samuels smiled as he heard the jagged catch of air in her throat, an apologetic attempt to backpedal.

He said, “Depending upon the municipality, my understanding is that it’s more convenient to simply leave us at the curb on trash day.”

“I… shit, Samuels, I didn’t even think about you--”

“I know you didn’t,” he stopped, seemingly touched.  “Which is why it’s quite alright.”

They’d come to the end of the corridor.  Samuels opened one of the two glass doors for her, ushering her into a vast, gloomy dimness.

Each of the halls they’d passed had been nicer than the last, and Ripley had a sense that this wing was reserved for either the very wealthy, or those especially revered in some way.  The memorials were outstandingly plain, each one nothing more than a waist-high hexagon of smooth black granite, every so often topped with a small items left by mourners.  Pewter placards indicated the honoree’s name, dates, and occasionally an  inscription significant to their life’s achievements.  It wasn’t until they’d progressed fairly deeply into the chamber that Ripley spied the small button embedded in the top of each pedestal.

Like a true engineer she pressed the very next one in their path, and Samuels stopped in immediate expectation, face upturned.  Ripley twitched in surprise as the pedestal lit up with a full-height holovid: a heavy-set, grandmotherly old woman in a checked dress and apron, smiling and stirring something in a batter bowl.

“Holy shit,” she breathed.  Then winced. “I mean--”

“You’re setting me up for failure, you realize.”

“I know. Sorry.  I’ll at least keep my voice down.”

The grandmother kept on stirring and smiling, every so often tipping her head with a look of tender warmth.  Ripley had never known either of her grandmothers, but this was the tailor-made embodiment of everything she would have wanted in one.

She bent to read the placard.  “Edina Stone, 2067 to 2132.  Beloved wife, grandmother and great-grandmother.   _We miss you, Nana_.”  She looked up again, just in time to see the almost imperceptible jump of the image as it looped back upon itself.

Samuels stood silently, watching her, his eyes hopeful and worried in a way Ripley had never seen before.

“Shall we?” he said.

Ripley nodded, falling back into step with him, and hit the button again to send Edina Stone back to her eternal rest.

Once she knew the trick of it, it was hard not to let her naturally inquisitive nature take over.  Their progress through the chamber stopped and started as she triggered one memorial, then another, then another, keying off details that struck her as unique or intriguing.  Samuels offered no observations of his own, giving her time to explore and watching her upturned face in the soft blue-violet flicker of the beloved dead.

She chuckled at the bespectacled man with the miniature poodle that kept jumping excitedly on its hind legs all around him.

She folded her arms, smiling and leaning into Samuels playfully at the smitten old couple slow-dancing in place.

She laughed outright at the Green Bay Packers fan in full chest- and face-paint, screaming in triumph and waving a foam hand in celebration of an eternal victory.

When she was ready, when she seemed more glad than unnerved, Samuels led her on again.

One of the pedestals was set apart from the others, last in a long row of memorials that were built into architectural recesses in the wall.  He said nothing as they approached, merely overlapping his hands before him as he stood aside.  For a moment Ripley wondered if he hadn’t arranged something special for Nina Taylor, after all.

She pressed the button, flickering the projection to life, and only then bent to read the name.

It had been fifteen years since she’d last seen her mother.

Ripley stood back, a hand clapping to her mouth, throat suddenly hot and aching.  Her eyes closed, viced tightly shut, the burn of tears searing her vision red against the black.  She forced them open again, inhaling jaggedly, then sobbed against the muffle of her palm.

She was beautiful.  Young and brassy and confident, posed in her flight jumpsuit as if she’d just zipped it on.  One hand rested at her hip, the other arm relaxed at her side, her mouth curled up in an expression of smirking amusement.

Amanda sleepwalked to the foot of the pedestal, face upturned, hand still at her mouth.  Her mother looked down on her, then away again, at an invisible party off to the side.  The illusion of a plump tabby cat intruded, materializing out of nothing, and stroked against her shins before it wandered off into the ether.  The elder Ripley laughed at something, made a comment to someone, shifted as if to adjust her weight to the other hip.

The image flickered.  Looped.

When Amanda only stood there silently, Samuels feared he’d done something wrong.  Something terribly, unforgivably wrong.  He was on the verge of an apology when she finally spoke, voice small.

“Can y… can you.  Samuels, can you read it?”  She lowered her hand finally, eyes shining like wet river stones in the dimness.  She blinked, vision doubling with tears.

He took a knee reverentially before the pedestal, reading aloud in his low, velvet timbre.

“Ellen Louise Ripley.  Born January 7, 2092.  Lost adrift on August 29th, 2122, with fellow crewmates of the _USCSS Nostromo_.  committed in her memory and honor, on behalf of her daughter, Amanda Ripley, with whom she sails still in spirit.”  He paused, difficult, then read, “ _Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than those you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover._ "

Samuels stood, avoiding her eyes as he murmured, “That was… Mark Twain.  I thought it apt.”

“Where did you…”  she gestured helplessly to the holovid.

“It was buried rather deep, but I was able to retrieve it from the Company’s personnel archives.  At the time, flight crews were being given full three-dimensional body scans before departure, as a means of studying muscle mass deterioration in cryosleep.  The study concluded well over a decade ago, but the information -- all the scans -- were still in the archive. I simply… extracted what I needed.”  His mouth twitched again, sheepish.  “There was more, but she began gesturing rather profanely at someone out of view of the camera, presumably one of her crew.  You have a great deal in common, apparently.”

The tightness of her throat broke to a helpless, bottled laugh.  Sobering, softening, Ripley turned and hugged him, squeezing until her arms ached.  She was normally as much a hugger as she was a crier -- rarely, and never for very long -- but the shy spread of Samuels’s hands at her back, the way he awed and timidly embraced her in return, convinced her to hang on for a little longer.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“You’re very welcome.  I only hope… Amanda, it wasn’t my intention to overstep my boundaries.  If I did--”

“You haven’t.”  Ripley eased back from him, attacking the dampness beneath her eyes with the heel of one hand.  “You did good.”

“I thought...”

She looked up as he stopped himself from finishing the thought, visibly torn, then urged him on with a nod.

“Go on.  You thought what?”

“I thought… if you had an additional incentive.  A reason to return to Earth more often, then… perhaps you might be inclined to visit.”  It all came out awkwardly, and he relaxed his shoulders with a self-conscious sigh.  “As the spirit moves you, of course.  I rather enjoyed the day out, and I hope you did as well.”

Ripley sighed, staring at him in confusion and wonder.  

“Who…”  She shook her hands at him, laughing in disbelief.  “Who _are_ you?”

He puzzled at her convincingly.

“I thought we’d been over this. I’m Samuels.  I work for the Company.”

Laughter blurted from her as she thudded his shoulder with a palm.  He smiled without reservation this time, feigning injury as he rubbed his aching wound.

“Careful.  Need I remind you I’m Weyland-Yutani property.”

“Right.  And I hear you’re very hard to get rid of.”

“Trash collection is on Wednesdays only.”

His smile softened in relief, and he joined her in looking back up at Ellen Ripley on her pedestal.  For just a moment she looked back down at them.

“It was a good day, wasn’t it,” Amanda murmured.

“It was,” he said.  “I hope there will be many more.”

 


End file.
